The Dante Game Read online

  Thereafter firearms and fast cars became Matteo’s life. The one led directly to the other. Providing a service with the first earned him the second. Unfortunately he had smashed his last car, a sporty Nissan Pulsar, but walked away from the collision unscathed. His mother said it was the intervention of the Blessed Virgin—although the Virgin had not protected the driver of the other car, a pretty young schoolteacher from Lucca.

  At the moment Matteo had no wheels to play with. He was saving his money for a Maserati. Signor Bindo kept him short, but he hinted that this business with the insane idealist would result in a lump sum sooner or later.

  The idealist had an apartment in the neighborhood of the Mercato Centrale. Matteo, perspiring in his priestly collar and dark suit, made his way among the stalls. Here everything was movement and color and loud music, with sunshine glittering on the hoods of cars and the windshields of parked motorbikes, reflecting brightly from the racks of sunglasses, sparkling in the miniature fountain above a bowl of fresh coconut. American tourists bought wallets and T-shirts, housewives lugged plastic bags of groceries by their stretched handles, swaggering kids in leather jackets fingered the gold neck-chains, boys bounced a soccer ball against the rough stone facade of the church of San Lorenzo. Where was the idealist’s apartment?

  Then Matteo’s eye was caught by a flashy Maserati parked at one side of the street. Gesùmmaria, it was just what he liked best. Himself, of course, he would choose the red rather than the black.

  Roberto Mori waited for Matteo, looking down at the market from above, his eye roving among the shoppers, searching for a priest. Through the open window floated all the lively smells of the market, the reek of hanging carcasses, the fragrance of ripe fruit trucked up from the south.

  Roberto had spent the morning at his new job in the Department of City Museums. As a former professor of Christian archeology he had hoped to work with the artifacts dug up from the foundation of the ancient church under the cathedral Instead he was a mere bureaucrat, assigning keys to janitors and cleaning women, granting or denying permission for school visits and special tours.

  It was a disappointment. But Roberto’s sense of himself was no longer bound up with his calling. It had once meant much to him to be a distinguished professor at the Gregorian University in Rome, but he had long since stopped regretting his lost ambition. Now all his passionate attention was directed elsewhere.

  His visitor was late. The market was closing. With a noise like the roll of a drum one of the carts rumbled away over the stony street. Now the other merchants followed suit, dropping gold chains into velvet boxes, stowing away the plastic statuettes of Michelangelo’s David, tossing purses into paper bags, collapsing the awnings, folding everything down into the carts.

  Where was Father Matteo?

  Then Roberto saw him, a young priest on the sidewalk beside a parked sports car. He was walking around it, slapping the hood, stroking the sleek surface, peering in at the dashboard. It seemed an odd thing for a priest to do. Roberto watched him turn away from the car and look up and down the street. Ah, now he was coming.

  Walking out into the hall, Roberto watched his visitor climb the stairs. “Buon giorno, Father,” he said amiably, as Father Matteo paused to stare. It happened all the time. People seemed to need a moment to get used to him. It was a nuisance, but Roberto was accustomed to it.

  In the apartment they settled down on two uncomfortable wooden chairs. Matteo held the letter and the envelope full of money on his lap and gazed admiringly at his host. Signor Bindo would be interested to hear that the man looked like a film star. Then, remembering what he had come for, he handed over Bindo’s letter.

  “It’s from one of the cardinals in the Vatican. He wishes you to know that he regrets your official silencing by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”

  “One of the cardinals?” said Roberto. “Which cardinal?”

  Matteo shook his head. “He can’t give his name. He’s one of many who feel the same way. He wants you to know that he shares your views.”

  “My views?” Roberto’s strong handsome face took on an expression of amused doubt. “And what are my views supposed to be?”

  Matteo recited his memorized list. “More democratic procedures in the church, an end to the doctrine of papal infallibility, a more liberal practice of releasing priests from their vows, a role for women in the hierarchy, an end to priestly celibacy, the possibility of divorce—”

  “Next, Father Matteo, you will be talking about abortion,” said Roberto gently, smiling at the eager young priest.

  Matteo looked surprised. Clearly it had been the next shocking word on his tongue.

  “Mi scusi,” said Roberto, opening the letter from the cardinal, reading it swiftly. At once his doubts fell away. The three closely written sheets had been penned on the stationery of the Council for Public Affairs of the Church, one of the august departments within the Vatican Secretariat of State. Roberto had visited the office, high on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace. He could picture the prelate writing the letter at his desk, looking up now and then to glance at Bernini’s colonnade, craning his neck to see the play of light and shade on the facade of the Basilica of Saint Peter. The letter was signed only Your friend, with a polite final command, Please destroy. Roberto was deeply moved.

  Smiling, he folded the letter and held it in his hand. For the first time he felt supported by a brother in the church—comforted, endorsed, sanctioned at last. It was so much more than he had expected; he longed to express his joy.

  But the vacuous young priest was not the right audience. Father Matteo was looking around inquisitively at the spare furnishings of the small apartment. He asked a nosy question. “How do you support yourself now, Father?”

  Roberto explained his job in the Department of City Museums. And he cautioned Father Matteo not to address him publicly as a priest.

  “Of course not.” Matteo leaned forward, excited to be sharing confidences with a man so distinguished. “Anch’ io. I too must become someone else. The soutane,”—he ran his finger around the edge of the stiff collar—“it’s much too conspicuous. People will remember a priest.” Then he handed the envelope full of lire to Father Roberto. “The cardinal also wished me to give you this. It will take care of extra expenses for a little while. You must count it and sign a receipt.”

  Roberto took the envelope. “The cardinal wishes it?”

  “Yes, yes, the cardinal.”

  CHAPTER 7

  For all their eyelids with an iron wire

  Are stitched and sealed…

  Purgatorio XIII, 70, 71.

  The Archbishop of Florence tried again a few days later, urged on by the vigorous encouragement of Leonardo Bindo. Bravely he dialed the Vatican switchboard himself, and asked to speak to the cardinal who was Prefect for the Pontifical Household.

  The prefect was wary. Was His Excellency going to raise the same impossible request for the pope’s presence in Florence on Easter morning the following year?

  He was. “I just want to be sure, Your Eminence,” said the archbishop hurriedly, “that you understand how eager we are to pay for everything, and how thorough our security arrangements will be. Here in this city we have access to hundreds of men in uniform to protect the safety of His Holiness—the polizia, the carabinieri, the soldati—”

  “How can I make it clear to you that such a visit is unthinkable? Your Excellency, I brought the matter up at our weekly congresso, and they all laughed merrily at such a suggestion. I assure you—”

  “But, Your Eminence, have you spoken to the holy father himself?”

  There was a pause. “No, but I don’t need to. He can’t possibly do such a thing.”

  Leaning forward at his desk, the archbishop knocked over a hideous marble paperweight in the shape of an obelisk, the gift of his niece. It fell with a crash, but he paid no attention, and spoke passionately into the telephone. “I beg you, Your Eminence, for this one thing, only th
is, that you will ask His Holiness.”

  There was another pause, and then the prefect sighed. “Well, perhaps. But not today. Not tomorrow. I can’t promise when I will have an opportunity.”

  “Thank you, Your Eminence. Let it be at your convenience. I’m deeply grateful.”

  The polite tug of war went on for weeks. The archbishop was a courteous person, but his program committee in the person of Leonardo Bindo continued to nag him to pester the Vatican.

  The archbishop had to keep forcing himself to call the prefect and appeal to him once again.

  At first his badgering phone calls bore no fruit. The responses were always the same. “I’m sorry, Your Excellency, I’ve had no time to speak to His Holiness. We’ve been far too busy planning his trip to the Orient”—“Oh, Your Excellency, not again! I can’t possibly speak to him now. There’s a general audience this afternoon. Seven hundred African priests and thirty bishops!”—“Oh, Archbishop, not today. I’ve just returned from poolside at Castel Gandolfo. The Holy Father is taking a complete rest. I couldn’t possibly disturb him.”

  After this last rebuff the archbishop spoke up in mild complaint, “But my committee is pressuring me, Your Eminence. I’ve got to tell them something.”

  “Then tell them no,” responded the prefect angrily. “I simply cannot hurry the Holy Father.”

  “Oh, no, no, no, it’s all right,” stuttered the archbishop. “I will await his decision with patience. Let it be entirely at your convenience.”

  When the prefect called at last to announce the pope’s decision, the archbishop felt no hope. He was stunned to learn that the holy father had been enthusiastic about the project. He would pop in and pop out on Easter Sunday morning as the archbishop suggested, arriving by helicopter at an early hour, returning to Rome in time for the all-important eleven o’clock mass in the Basilica of Saint Peter.

  The archbishop began to splutter his gratitude, but the prefect interrupted to warn him that the holy father would come if and only if the security arrangements were worked out in advance, if and only if thirty members of the Vatican Vigilanza and the Swiss Guard were present at the ceremony, having been quartered in Florence the day before.

  “Oh, but of course,” cried the archbishop. “Certainly! Money no object. I will write to His Holiness at once to express our gratitude. Our prayers have been answered.”

  At once he called Signor Bindo, to tell him the good news.

  Signor Bindo was overjoyed.

  CHAPTER 8

  For better waters heading with the wind

  My ship of genius now shakes out her sail.…

  Purgatorio I, 1, 2.

  It was left to the trustees back in Boston to advertise for students. Before long a sign went up on bulletin boards all over the university—

  STUDY ABROAD

  The American School of Florentine Studies,

  Villa L’Ombrellino, Florence,

  will open its doors this fall to eleven

  resident students. Applicants must be above

  sophomore rank. Postgraduates, alumni

  and alumnae may also apply.

  Applications are available in the office of

  the Department of Comparative Literature.

  The notice looked splendid and inviting, but the staff was still incomplete. The two Florentine professors had yet to be balanced by two recruits from the United States.

  For instruction in Italian history the obvious choice was Augustus Himmelfahrt, a specialist at the University of Chicago, who had written a thick book on the subject.

  Himmelfahrt was delighted. At once he made an excited transatlantic call to inquire about accommodations. Would his room at the villa have a private bath?

  “Of course,” said Zee, instantly identifying him as a shit. Zee had spent twelve years of his life teaching at American and Italian institutions of higher learning, and he knew the varieties of academic imbecility very well. Pulling out his pen, he began doodling a portrait of Himmelfahrt on the pad beside the phone, a cartoon face with a tiny nose and a colossal chin. He didn’t tell Himmelfahrt that the only private bath in the villa was an old one with a vast tub holding fifty gallons, heated by a gadget with a rusty ten-gallon tank.

  There remained only a single post to fill, that of instructor of contemporary Italian literature. One possible American candidate after another refused the offer. Either they were pregnant or in the throes of a divorce or already under contract for next year.

  “What about Kelly?” suggested the chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature. “You know that guy at Harvard who used to be a detective? He’s mostly American Lit, but he’s always going on about Alberto Moravia or Italo Calvino. Try Homer Kelly.”

  “Oh, I know Kelly,” said the president of the trustees. “Isn’t he something of a wild man? Well, not exactly wild, just sort of exaggerated, if you know what I mean?”

  “Exaggerated? Well, perhaps.” There was a ruminative pause, and then the department chairman concluded stuffily, “But sound, I would say. The man is altogether sound.”

  It was true that Homer Kelly was an exaggerated person, somewhere at one end of the curve of human possibility. Taller than most people, Homer was given to various forms of hyperbole. For one thing he was noisy and gregarious, indulging in spasms of euphoria that alternated with fits of gloom. For another he had a habit of tripping over his own large feet, and he didn’t know how to repair a light fixture. Thirdly he was nosy and inquisitive and apt to spring to conclusions by leaps of intuition rather than logical reasoning. Lastly Homer Kelly was rapacious of experience, wallowing in the present moment, greeting the morning with savage appetite.

  When the call came, Homer was on his knees in his front yard in Concord, groping at oak leaves under a bush. When he heard the phone ring inside the house, he sat up suddenly, and a twig lashed his eye. Whimpering, he ran up the steps, snatched at the phone and barked, “Ouch, ouch, hello?”

  Thus he wasn’t in the most receptive mood to accept a teaching post in a foreign land. “I’ll think it over,” he said, mopping his streaming eye.

  “Good God, Mary,” he said to his wife when she came back from shopping, “I can’t read all those Italian novels over the summer.”

  But Mary was thrilled. “How wonderful. I’ll come too. I’ll go to Rome and find out about all those American artists abroad, friends of the Brownings and so on. I’ll write another book.”

  “But, listen, my dear—”

  “Nonsense, Homer. Look, I’ll help. We’ll read those people together. And we’ll study Italian. And while we’re about it, let’s read The Divine Comedy. It’s one of the supreme works of art in the western world, and it’s been out since the fourteenth century, so it’s high time.”

  Meanwhile on the other side of the ocean in the Villa L’Ombrellino, Giovanni Zibo went on with his preparations. He bought a secondhand van and spent a hot afternoon in the middle of May painting the school’s name on its two front doors. Lucretia ordered twenty mattresses from the Casa del Materasso on Piazzale al Prato. She drove off to a shop on Via Franceso Ferrucci for a set of cheap mirrors of wavy glass. The wardrobes, bedsteads, desks and chairs came from a warehouse in Pisa.

  “Soap,” she cried, staring at Zee. “Toilet paper. What else have I forgotten? Wastebaskets!” And she rushed off again to consult the yellow pages. She hired a cook, Alberto Fraticelli, and a chambermaid, Alberto’s wife, Isabella. She found a gardener, Franco Spoleto. She advertised for a secretary to occupy the school office on the second floor of the villa, a handsome chamber with a ceiling of blue clouds.

  Books in English for the American students were a problem. They were so expensive.

  “Perhaps the American faculty members could bring them from the United States,” suggested Lucretia.

  “Well, we can try,” said Zee, and he called Professor Kelly.

  Homer was agreeable. “Which edition of The Divine Comedy do you want, Professor Zibo?” he said, speakin
g to the Italian professor for the first time.

  “Call me Zee. I thought the Sayers edition, Professor Kelly.”

  “My name is Homer. Oh, good, that’s the one we’re using.” Homer showed off. Deepening his voice to a roar, he intoned the first lines of Dante’s Inferno in the Sayers translation—

  “Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,

  I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

  Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

  That’s the translation you want?”

  “Oh, yes, that’s the one. It’s not perfect, and sometimes she strains too hard after rhymes, but the notes are excellent, don’t you agree?”

  And then Zee hung up, and went on groping through the tangled branches of his own dark wood. By now it was the way life presented itself to him, a dusky vista of narrow glimmering passages between the trunks of sullen trees.

  During this second week in June, Julia Smith arrived in Florence. She found a room at once in a third-class pensione near the railroad station and settled down to see the sights. First the cathedral, then the Uffizi, then Michelangelo’s David, then the Palazzo Vecchio.

  At the end of the third day Julia climbed the stairs to her room in tears, disappointed by the stony city choked with tourists, worn out with the stares and catcalls, suffering from loneliness.

  Perhaps she should never have come. Perhaps she was wasting the remains of her small inheritance.

  Julia had been eager to experience at first hand a city crowded with works of art, but somehow it wasn’t what she had expected. She had longed to be surrounded by greatness, she had hungered for the flesh of genius, but so far she was still starving.